Arms Warrior DPS Guide — Shadowlands 9.0.2

Arms Warriors are strong but somewhat slow damage dealers which revolve around building burst damage windows with Colossus Smash. Their greatest strength comes in the form of a versatile toolkit, offering Single Target, close-range cleave, burst AoE, and even a limited form of physical damage immunity.

Strengths

• Very flexible toolkit, able to spec into any damage profile from single target,
• two-target cleave, sustained multitarget, or burst AoE.
• High mobility class due to Charge, Intervene, and Heroic Leap.
• Multiple defensive abilities between Die by the Sword, Ignore Pain, Spell Reflection, and Rallying Cry.
• Source of the important attack power buff Battle Shout.

Weaknesses

• Slow, rather bland rotation without many exciting moments.
• Lack of powerful single target burst cooldowns.
• Must choose how to specialize by talenting into either sustained multitarget with Cleave or burst AoE with Warbreaker.

We are maintaining a list of changes for Warriors, so you can see what changed between Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. The new expansion also introduces new character customization options with Covenants and Legendary Powers, for which we have Warrior-specific pages that you can access below.

Arms Warriors have not changed much in Shadowlands, with only a few talent and ability adjustments. Players familiar with the Battle for Azeroth version of Arms will find it familiar, although there are a few noticeable differences, and the inclusion of unpruned defensive and utility spells gives the spec more gameplay options than before.

The most notable change for Arms Warriors is the Mastery Mastery: Deep Wounds now increasing the targets damage taken form all abilities, placing emphasis back on the player casted abilities rather than the passive DoT effect. Maintaining this debuff will therefore be the upmost importance, in both single target and multitarget situations.

This change also impacts the DPS rotation, as Execute no longer applies Deep Wounds, placing additional emphasis on Mortal Strike to maintain the effect. However, the debuff now lasts significantly longer, and is also applied by Colossus Smash, making it fairly easy to keep active.

If you want to play an Arms Warrior, but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Once you reach max level, it can be somewhat overwhelming to completely change the way you play by suddenly implementing a large number of addons in a short space of time, especially if they have a heavy visual impact on your UI. We recommend using some of the more basic addons recommended on our Addons page below while leveling, so that you have more time to get used to them during the easier phases of playing your class.

Arms Warrior is a relatively simple spec based on resource management. As there are few on-demand Rage generators, most resource generation comes from autoattacks, so anticipating them along with the cooldown of important abilities is important to ensure that you neither find yourself Rage starved and unable to use Mortal Strike on cooldown, or capping and wasting Rage generation during Bladestorm.

The rotation has a fair amount of downtime, which means a fair bit of time will be spent simply waiting. While you could fill empty Global Cooldowns with Slam or Whirlwind, doing so constantly can leave you unable to use Mortal Strike when you need to. During the Shadowlands pre-patch, this is better compensated for due to gear inflation, but it is still important to ensure you keep Mortal Strike on cooldown and maximize spending Rage during Colossus Smash rather than outside of it.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec, but would like to learn the basic fundamentals of the class, recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you are already somewhat familiar with Warriors, you can head straight to the Talents and Rotation pages to jump right into the more complex, detailed information.

Despite the fact that gearing has become more challenging, due to the huge number of variables that depend on your character, you can find information on how best to gear an Arms Warrior on our dedicated gearing page, which includes the current Best in Slot from this tier.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.

Shadowlands introduces several new systems which increase the baseline power of Arms Warriors. Players will be given the choice to join one of four different Covenants, each of which adds their own unique offensive class-specific ability, signature ability, talent tree-like Soulbinds, and socketable conduits which further increase their power.

Additionally, the end-game activity Torghast will allow players to craft Legendary Powers items with unique general, class-specific, or spec-specific powers.

For example, one player may decide to join the Venthyr covenant, gaining access to Condemn which replaces Execute with a stronger version. From there, they can access the Nadjia the Mistblade Soulbind for more bonuses, allocate the Ashen Juggernaut Conduit to further increase the damage of Condemn. Finally, farming Torghast for legendary materials will allow them to craft a piece of gear with the Exploiter bonus, bringing the whole build together.

Starting off as an Arms Warrior can look very different from the absolute end-game raiding and progression as one. Our Mythic+, Torghast, Raiding, and PvP guides can guide you to performing as well as possible, regardless of your focus in end-game content.

If you are finding your performance lackluster, but are not sure where you are going wrong, you can check out the pages below for potential tips, or answers to questions you may have.

Arms has powerful burst damage abilities with short cooldowns, making it both extremely competitive and easy to play in Mythic+ dungeons, where it can align those abilities with most pulls. Although it will not always fill every global between cooldowns, those abilities refresh frequently enough that the downtime is minimal, and further reduced by higher gear. In addition to powerful on-demand burst-AoE, Arms also excels at two target cleave, making it the premier choice any time additional targets are involved. Defensively, Arms Warriors are one of the weaker specializations, with a long primary cooldown and niche defensive talent choices.